Like left wing MP Diane Abbot's son, for example.
Ms Abbott, then MP for Hackney North, was widely condemned for entering James for the £13,000-a-year City of London School. She admitted her decision was ‘indefensible’. She'd previously condemned Tony Blair, and Harriet Harman, then the solicitor general, for not sending their children to traditional state schools. She allegedly said of Ms Harman's decision to send her son to a grammar school: (not a Private school), "She made the party look as if we do one thing and say another."
So here was someone who purports to be a staunch socialist, who for two decades had railed against privilege. Here was a conviction politician from the Left who’d attacked senior Labour figures for putting their kids in selective schools, going one step further, putting her son in a far more exclusive school and buying him even better life-chances.
She made the racist comment: ‘White people love playing divide and rule. We should not play their game,’ and referring to ‘tactics as old as colonialism’. (Errm? Run that past me again please).
Professor Tim Brighouse, the London schools commissioner, interviewed in the Local Government Chronicle, said it was wrong to believe that the capital's comprehensive schools were worse than those in other parts of England. Exam statistics showed that the opposite was true. Even those serving the poorest communities in London outperformed those in other parts of the country, he said.
Prof Brighouse said that cross-referencing GCSE results with the proportion of pupils eligible for free school meals - the standard poverty yardstick - showed that London schools did better than those elsewhere. It was "extremely sad" when people opted to go private, he added. "My experience in putting my children through urban schools is that they achieve in a vivid and rich environment that is determinedly improving its performance."
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2003/nov/01/uk.schools
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/diane-abbott-i-sent-my-son-to-private-230293
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...th-delivered-1-2million-home-court-hears.html
After GCEs, when aged 20, James Abbott, was sent to study in the sixth form of the £6,000-a-year SOS-Hermann Gmeiner International College in Tema, Ghana, which boasts facilities such as a ‘near-Olympic-sized pool’ and declares that its students ‘graduate with an internationally recognised baccalaureate and are then able to study at almost any university in the world’.
Lo and behold, like his mother, he went to Cambridge, and enjoyed a meteoric rise within the Foreign Office, after joining Diplomatic Fast Stream in 2014.
But sadly it didn’t end well. Maybe he mixed with the wrong crowd?
Aged 28, in late 1999, and July 2 2020 when he is accused of carrying out three attacks including two on emergency workers outside Homerton Hospital and elsewhere in Hackney where his mother lives. He was charged with 11 new offences including 9 assaults - most on police and medics. He also faces count of exposure in hospital and racially/religiously aggravated criminal damage
He had crystal meth delivered to her home when she was Shadow Home Secretary. He was said to have chased her around her £1.2million home with scissors, claiming he had a gun in his dressing gown pocket. James Abbott-Thompson was high on a cocktail of drugs when he started ‘threatening his mother with violence’. He then went on a drug-induced rampage, attacking nine police officers, doctors, nurses and security guards at various hospitals. It emerged the ‘rising star’ had been hooked on drugs even before he joined the Foreign Office fast-track scheme in 2014.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...th-delivered-1-2million-home-court-hears.html
As a parent of two adult sons, she has my deepest sympathy. She did what she thought was best for her son, gave him what she thought was a head-start in life, and she must be bereft at the outcome. I wish her well in her bid to be elected as MP at the General Election by those Labour voters who don't mind at all that she sent her kid to a private school, and then to do the baccalaureate at an exclusive private school in Ghana.
